Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux is an outsider’s first-hand look into the crypto boom and bust cycle that took place from 2020 to 2022. The central question posed by the book is: is Tether the engine pumping asset prices up? Unfortunately, the book fails to answer this question and, while the reading was pleasant, it feels like the making of version of a book that does not exist, retelling the author’s journey in his investigation.
The main strength of the book is how well the author captures the wild ride of the 2020-2022 run. The book contains many of the absurd events of the period and the on-the-ground investigation was great: while I had heard before about the prison complexes that house the people behind pig-butchering scams, reading his interviews with people directly involved in this gave the whole scheme some physicality. But by far the most surprising part was his interviews with some of the big names of the scene such as SBF.
SBF is a fascinating figure. Not because he is particularly interesting but because he was able to captivate a large following of influential people, like Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short, using his quirky persona. This is surprising to me: he comes as annoying in the book’s interviews and his philosophy (take every positive expected value bet) sounds absolutely insane to me or to anyone who knows a bit about risk management. Considering this, it is not that surprising that both his exchange and hedge fund went bust.
It is unfortunate that the book fails to find definitive evidence on Tether’s balance sheet. We will probably never know how much of the suspicions on Tether were warranted given that, as the book rightfully points out, the rise in interest rates made the business substantially stronger. Since then, the current US administration also normalized crypto and stablecoins, giving them more legitimacy. That being said, some of the excesses seem to be part of the past with the zeitgeist shifting to AI on the investment side and to prediction markets on the gambling side.